Chapter 4 of 6 / the money has not appeared
I sent it to an old deposit address
This is the page in the chapter with the worst answer, and it is worth being direct rather than encouraging. Depending on how the market handles it, the money may be recoverable and it may simply be gone.
Why deposit addresses expire at all
A deposit address is usually generated for one user and one session so the market can tell whose money arrived without asking. Reuse breaks that link, and an old address may have been reassigned, retired or detached from your account entirely.
That is why the deposit page tends to show a countdown, and why the countdown is not decoration.
What happens to the payment
| What the market does | How often | Outcome for you |
|---|---|---|
| The address still maps to your account | Sometimes | It credits late, or after a manual step |
| The address is retired but still watched | Sometimes | Recoverable, slowly, and not guaranteed |
| The address was reassigned | Uncommon | Somebody else account received it |
| The address is no longer watched at all | Common enough to assume it | Gone. There is no process for this |
Which row to plan for
Assume the last row until shown otherwise. Planning around the hopeful rows is how people end up sending a second payment to the same wrong place while waiting for the first one to be sorted out.
How people end up here
- A saved deposit address in a wallet address book. The most common route by a distance.
- Copying from an old browser tab that was open from a previous session.
- Reusing a QR code from a screenshot.
- Leaving the deposit page open for hours and sending after the countdown ran out.
The habit that prevents it
- Generate a fresh deposit address every single time. It costs one click.
- Never save one in a wallet address book. They are not durable destinations.
- Send immediately after generating it, not after a break.
- Compare the first and last several characters after pasting, because software on your own machine can replace the whole string between the copy and the paste.
The related failure worth knowing about
The check in step four is not about typos. There is software that watches for anything address shaped and replaces it between the copy and the paste, and it costs nothing to run against many machines at once. Checking a signature does not catch it, because the machine doing the checking is the machine doing the swapping. Comparing the ends of what actually landed in the field is the only thing that does.